"Their lives are totally in our hands," one veteran engineer of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration put it later. Ordinary people could do it, too.Īs with every space flight, the crew's arrival marked an emotional moment for the ground crews that prepare the vehicle for launch and monitor its voyage. Her presence on the flight, said Tom Wolfe, the author of "The Right Stuff," would take a lot of the mystique out of space exploration. She was the main attraction to the hordes who came here for the shuttle program's 25th flight. Still, this flight had something special that drew an unusually large crowd of reporters and onlookers: the first "ordinary" citizen to be strapped into the orbiter and sent aloft, a 37-year-old Concord, N.H., teacher named Christa McAuliffe. The notion of seven men and women climbing into a bomblike contraption and riding fire into space was no longer big news. The launch of the space shuttle Challenger, already twice delayed, was set for Sunday morning, but for many veterans of the space program, the action was across the continent in California, where a persistent little satellite named Voyager 2 was beaming back the first closeup shots of the planet Uranus. They wore the customary uniforms of NASA: blue jumpsuits, white sneakers and broad smiles. It was a Thursday afternoon when the T38 trainers, nifty little single-engine jets, whisked in from Houston carrying six astronauts and a teacher bound for space. (Dave Mosher/Wired.Washington Post Staff Writers Staff writer Eric Pianin contributed to this report. *Images: Space shuttle Atlantis lifts off Launch Pad 39A for the last time. Lisa Grossman contributed to this report. "But I'm not the policy-maker, I'm the implementer. We need to learn to live on another body" like the moon, said space shuttle launch director Michael Leinbach in a pre-launch press briefing. "I think we as a species need to be thinking about living off this planet long-term, very long-term. NASA is dreaming up missions beyond low-Earth orbit, however, and awaiting Apollo-era-like clarity from the president. Until then, the United States will purchase flights on board Russia's Soyuz system for its astronaut corps. NASA is seeding money to commercial spaceflight companies to develop a human-ready spaceship, but the space agency expects a viable spacecraft to emerge no earlier than five years from now. No American spacecraft is ready to ferry astronauts to the space station during its anticipated 10-year lifespan. But the shape of things to come is uncertain. human spaceflight won't end with the conclusion of Atlantis' mission. Two of the missions - Challenger's last in 1986 and Columbia’s in 2003 - ended catastrophically and claimed the lives of 14 astronauts. The space agency ultimately launched 135 space shuttle missions since 1981 at a total cost of about $209 billion. "Rather than lowering the costs of access to space and making it routine, the space shuttle turned out to be an experimental vehicle with multiple inherent risks, requiring extreme care and high costs to operate safely," he wrote in an op-ed published Wednesday by MIT Technology Review. "If we really wanted to have something that would have flown as frequently, we would have spent more," he said.īut space-policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University thinks the shuttle was the wrong spacecraft altogether. drew a line on how much money would be spent," said Wayne Hale, a former NASA mission manager who now works as a director of human spaceflight for Special Aerospace Services.Įarly on, Hale said, the program never got the roughly $5 billion it needed to build a robust launch system that could handle 64 launches a year, so it was forced to make costly compromises. "It's a tough technical challenge to build a reusable spacecraft, and the president's Office of Management.
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